Transition Circles - A Personal Carbon Reduction Review

Welcome to the Transition Circles and Carbon Conversations theme slot. We're starting off with a personal carbon reduction review based on the results of real experiences in TN’s Strangers’ Circle. Mark Watson reports:

Strangers' Beginnings

In June 2009 TN2 was formed as a response to climate change, with the aim of reducing our personal carbon use and emissions to half the national average over the coming year. The Strangers’ Circle emerged as one of TN2’s Transition Circles, made up of those of us living outside of Norwich. We began to meet every month bringing food to each others’ houses, where we would discuss the principle drivers of carbon use (transport, food, home energy, ‘stuff’) and ways we could reduce it.

The meetings were informal, exploratory and intimate. We looked at the real evidence of our energy use, our individual log books and shopping lists. We brought our energy bills to the table to share along with the food for the meeting on home energy. We led quite different lives. Some of us owned our homes, some rented. Some of us had children, others not. We had different financial circumstances. So our responses and actions were also different depending on those circumstances.

Winter 2009/10

When winter arrived last year Charlotte and I decided to forgo the central heating. We heated the water for one hour a day. We used the radiators for drying clothes when they really wouldn’t dry outside. We dressed up warm. We lit fires, but not every day. It was cold. We rent our house. The windows are double-glazed and there is minimal insulation. Our next door neighbours are not there all the time so their house is cold, too, with no heat coming through the walls. We live in a semi-detached rural cottage built in 1884. This is interesting to visitors who walk past in the summer, look up at the numbers built into the brick on the front and say “Eighteen eighty four!” and walk on. But it means that we can’t have cavity wall insulation.

It was an interesting six months (and last winter did go on for six months!) and those monthly Strangers’ Circle meetings were key to maintaining my enthusiasm and momentum. Shared human warmth was both metaphorical and literal.

Where We Are Now

This week we had our first delivery of oil in 19 months. Oil is what fuels our central heating and hot water. We also have a woodburner in the living room. Here are some figures to put things in context:

In October 2008 we ordered 500 litres of oil (at 48p per litre), and in April 2009 another 500 (42p per litre). That was our last order before this week of 500 litres (at 58p per litre, up 16p a litre since last April). The woman on the phone at Total Butler said it was wise to order now as prices looked set to increase further. When we first moved here in January 2003 oil cost around 18p per litre, and we’d order a whole tank (1200 litres) twice a year.

I worked out that we’d reduced our oil use by two-thirds since joining the Strangers' group. What's more, when the cold began this year we noticed it hasn’t bothered us as much.

In large part for me it worked because of the sustained attention over many months on personally reducing carbon emissions within the structure of a group engaged in doing just that.

And for this winter? I’ve been sawing up dead elms from the trees in and around our garden for the woodburner. We’ve arranged with the landlord to get the radiators fixed so we can turn eight out of the ten of them off without their leaking. We’ll live mostly in one of the rooms and have some heating on the coldest days. And hopefully not have to order any more oil at least until April 2012.

Transition Circle Earlham North are meeting on Monday 30 November, Circle Hethersett on Tuesday 1 December and Circle Earlham South on Monday 7 December (see Calendar for details)

Pics: Carbon Conversations and Strangers' Circle; Piping Oil

The Kind of Party I Vote For

Last night the Strangers' Circle met up at Elena's and Alan's in Keswick for our May meeting. We were celebrating two birthdays (Elena's and mine) and a wedding anniversary (William's and Naomi's), and we were also divvying up our first food order as a co-op, which Tully had collected earlier in the day.

The food was awesome. Elena's Indian-style tomato and lentil soup with tamarind and cassia bark silenced us all, and we're not a quiet company! There was freshly baked bread, just-picked asparagus, Naomi and William's pasta bake, Tully and Angie's spinach roulade, fluffy baked potatoes and Alan's homemade cider (pure nectar). All delicious. There was more to come, but first to work.

With quick and nimble fingers, Charlotte, Elena, Tully and Naomi set about weighing rice, chick peas and lentils and packing them in old margarine tubs and used plastic bags. Dusk was falling and I darted about with the camera, trying to keep things focused and not use the flash, with varying degrees of success. I tripped up and splashed licorice tea over Elena's cushions and some of Naomi's order, which they were both extremely nonchalant about. William did the washing up, Alan checked the football results for Naomi on the internet, Tully checked the figures on the order, Charlotte and Elena poured and packed. And it was all done in about half an hour.

Back in the kitchen Charlotte raised a toast with the champagne Naomi had brought and we sang a version of Happy Birthday, which we altered on spec to include wedding anniversaries. And we ate the stunning chocolate birthday/anniversary cake Charlotte had baked all with organic ingredients, creme Chantilly and last year's blackcurrants, and decorated with local strawberries and the edible wild and garden flowers of the spring. On the top we put tiny beeswax candles with holders Angie had made on the spot out of tin foil. It was lovely. We decided to host a Transition Circles Midsummer picnic on 21st June at Mangreen in celebration of our low-carbon year in TN2. There'll be a carbon cutting quiz and Naomi will be Quizmaster! Everyone is welcome.

We also decided to look at Resilience in our next six meetings (beginning with a discussion about this key transition concept) and Tully spoke about the feasta report in respect to current non-resilient systems. Then Charlotte briefly mapped out a joint project for our low-carbon cookbook... because we couldn't stay off the topic of food for too long!


Pics: The Strangers' Circle celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and co-operative food buying; A Transition Wholefood Circle of organic rice, chick peas, lentils, peas, gluten free pasta, ring of fire chillies and a bay leaf, by Charlotte

Downshift

It happened last night. Just as we arrived back from our Strangers' Circle we came into the wet dark garden and the scent was everywhere. And so we opened the letter box to let the fragrance of the flowers permeate the house, come up the stairs and into our dreams.

It was the honeysuckle moment. Each flower has its moment: it spends weeks developing its individual show and then it bursts out into the world in a glorious mass of colour and beauty. When you learn to love flowers, you wait for those moments and treasure them when they arrive: the shocking moment when the bluebells shimmer in the woods like liquid fire, when the poppies ripple through the barley. Last week it was the hawthorn moment, this week we’ll head for the coast and find the sea kales flourishing in front of the nuclear power station at Sizewell. And for that moment we’ll immerse ourselves in the scent and presence of the great Krambe maritima growing in spite of all odds through the shingle. Holding a deep root in a hard time, for the flowers and for ourselves.

We had been talking about resilience, which is the subject of our new sequence of Transition Circle meetings. People talked practically and spiritually, about energy systems and political systems, about economic collapse and peak oil and how our complex global supply chains have become increasingly dependent on computerisation and special parts and therefore vulnerable. Some of us were pessimistic, not sure if we will be able to live without this stuff. Some optimistic and felt we had possibilities within us that had yet to be tapped. Resilience is the ability for eco-systems to weather shocks, to absorb their impact and regroup, adapt and hold together. We talk about community and getting into alignment with the earth, but we live with the spectre of History, where societies habitually fragment in the face of difficulties; where the rich triumph, the poor go to the wall, and those of us who speak out for love and freedom board the train for the gulag.

I have, like most people in this country, been able to avoid History and do not know how things would be in England if our social fabric breaks. I have however been through many individual shocks. A lot of them forced me to leave places and people, set-ups I had taken for granted, to look at the flimsy things I had depended on: spiritual fancies, culture, friendships, beliefs, reputation, innocence. Some of them made me abandon my biography entirely and start again. All of them broke me out of a small space. All of them made me more human. Only a heart that is broken and bitter knows how to feel beyond its personal circumstance and reach out for its fellows. When you have nothing to lose is when life opens up. When you are terrified of losing, you close down and don’t see the bigger picture, you only care for yourself, your space, your cherished beliefs about the world.

To be truly human, aligned with life, resilient, we need to hold on to what is dear and be prepared to let everything else go. To respond to that shocking moment we have to be flexible and open and to know how to work with people, so that History does not repeat itself and mash us in its maw. We have to practice thinking together, working together, exchanging things, sharing knowledge, knowing that the shocks will come and we can keep coherent and not fall apart. And like all resilient eco-systems, we need to be in communication and feedback what we experience and feel. Gathering up sweetness the way bees do from flowers. What we can’t afford to do is shut down.

So there was a different mood at Naomi and William’s last night. We discussed our wholefood co-op order and our new project, the Low Carbon Cookbook, but our usual exuberance about dishes we brought had shifted. We were no longer looking at carbon reduction in the light (sic) of reducing energy, as if our way of life was going to continue only more ecologically. We were looking at something else entirely around the kitchen table. A moment of radical change. A change which we can only look at for real when we are together, because each of us carries within us a vital component that makes that possible, both to see and to bear. Because that change is about coming together after decades of individualism. Because something about this moment is extraordinary, fragrant, unexpected yet known. Coming out of the dark, permeating the atmosphere, like honeysuckle after a storm.

Underneath the May; hawthorn flowers; honeysuckle and bumblebee door; Tully talking about resilience with the Strangers' Circle at Mangreen.

Transition Food Patterns - An Introduction

Welcome to our first features week on the blog. We’re starting with the subject of Food in Transition in celebration of the Food and Farming Group’s successful funding bid for their four projects, including Norwich’s first CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). During the week we’ll be looking at some of the food buying and growing patterns that form a key role in the social shift of Transition.

I first became aware of these “patterns” when we discussed Food in the Strangers’ Transition Circle in January. Tully had suggested we bring our weekly shopping lists and pay attention to them in terms of carbon reduction. Though we’d shared our electricity bills and car log books when assessing Home Energy use and Transport, Food felt different somehow. More complex and yet more in our own hands. I wrote the week’s transactions down and was surprised how many there were: grocer, fruiterer, market garden, veg box, farm shop, roadside stall, hedgerow.

Because it was not always so. I spent part of my working life writing about food and style. I ate in a lot of swanky restaurants and cooked (and styled) a lot of glamorous recipes. I lived in a world that thought nothing of paying $100 to eat the rare and dangerous fugu fish in New York, or a 17 course meal in Japan based on autumn leaves. And although travelling for real definitely altered my outlook on life and I have eaten a lot of humble rice and beans since, it wasn’t until I took part in Sustainable Bungay’s Growing Local food conference in 2008 that I became aware that something radical on a social scale needed to happen.

Josiah had invited several speakers for the event, including Mahesh Pant from Grow-Our-Own in Norwich and Clare Joy from Organic Lea in Walthamstow. Tully Wakeman from East Anglia Food Link opened the day and spoke about peak oil and its relationship with agriculture. He talked about the effects of our diet on the land ( 70% of grain grown in East Anglia is for animal feed) and asked if pigs were fed soya from the rainforest in Brazil could they be strictly called “local pork”? In an energy-scarce future we’re going to have to eat lower down the food chain, he said. Less meat, less dairy.

I had been a vegetarian for years by this time, and no longer shopped at supermarkets, so this news was not revelatory on a personal level, it was cultural. I had not joined the dots about agriculture and oil before. Or realised that the crops growing in the fields were for chickens. As for changing the national diet, to deliberately eat like peasants in a culture that was fixated on feasting like kings? This would not just be a matter of style, it was going to need some kind of seachange.

Food is one of the clearest ways of “getting” Transition. If you want to become aware of the ramifications of peak oil and climate change you have to go no further than your plate. Deconstruct the next dish you cook (or order). Find out where the ingredients came from and how many procedures it took to appear before you, and you can see global industrialisation at work. Transition aims to bring those ingredients a lot closer to home. So that food can be grown, produced and sold within a short (preferably walking) distance. Or at least if it has to come from far away (e.g. rice) it's fairly-traded, organic and hasn’t been flown in by plane. This is not just about taking responsibility for the waste (production and packaging), high resource and water use, soil depletion and the effects of pesticides that our modern food system wreaks, it’s also about forging meaningful links with life, with the place you live in and with people.

You can’t get more disconnected than our present system. Food, sealed in plastic, kept in large windowless hangers with artificial lighting, where hundreds of anonymous people move silently from one aisle to the next. We’re all foolish consumers in this world: we grab junk food without thinking, or spend hours obsessively following complicated recipes, like cooks out of a fairy tale.

Somewhere there is a sane and clear way to downshift our eating patterns, to decarbonise our agriculture, and get ourselves back on track with the eco-systems of the planet. That big corporate-driven system is hard to change from the outside as an individual, even as a grassroots organisation, but any of us can reconnect at any time. “Vote with your fork, ” advised the food writer Michael Pollan, when asked how to help the vanishing honeybees. “Three times a day.”

Reconnection gives value and meaning to food. But most of all it gives us back relationships that were once severed – relationships with the vegetable kingdom, with the creatures, with the weather, with the people who tend plants, who work with their hands, baking bread, collecting fruit, selling veg and rice and beans. And it gives back relationship with ourselves, as we learn to swap dishes, seeds, cucumber plants, plum jam, foraging skills, our experiential knowledge of the world. As we put our attention on the stuff of life and all its vital exchanges - so more of it can happen.

In the next ten days on This Low Carbon Life the TN blog crew will be looking at some of the food buying and growing patterns that make up Transition. We’ll be visiting some of the outlets in Norwich and in the hinterlands, as well as the ways we can take food production back into our hands from foraging to wholefood co-ops, from pig clubs to local bakers. Eat with us. Stay tuned!

Above: roadside stall en route to Beccles; shopping in Middleton Farm Stores; wholefood pattern from Strangers' Circle/Rainbow buying co-op.

Voting with my fork – low-carbon dinner in the tent - Basil’s spinach (Middleton Farm Stores). Norman’s runner beans (local market garden), organic gluten-free pasta (Rainbow Wholefoods/Strangers' Circle buying Co-op), Malcolm’s tomatoes and garlic (veg box); Sarah’s courgettes (roadside stall), home grown chili and basil (from TN seedling swap originally grown by John).

Carbon Admissions

We had our first Stranger's Circle meeting last Friday. The Transition Circles started after Tully wrote a ground-breaking paper on the need to expand and explore the work of carbon reduction. A hub group formed in July called TN2 and this has since developed into the Circles, based in different neighbourhoods. The Strangers (after Stranger's Hall in Norwich, originally a meeting house for the Hugenot weavers), are a group of us that live in the hinterland of Norwich. Our first meeting was held in Shotesham and like the other groups, Circle West and City Centre, we decided to talk about energy.

After our shared meal in the kitchen (with Angie's delicous damsons for dessert - see pic above) we talked Electricity, mostly in relation to home heating. Already we're into October and temperatures outside are falling with the leaves. Last winter Mark and I had our heating on for one hour each day and we really toughened up. "It's important to turn everything into an adventure," I declared. Everyone thought we were way too extreme (though Elena said she and Alan were thinking of cutting out heating in the mornings this winter). We decided that keeping one room warm during the evening was the most efficacious way forward. Because the Strangers live out of the city we have an easier time with wood-burning stoves and can go collecting fallen wood or trees in our own gardens and hedgerows. It's also easier to get outside and have a relationship with the earth, the wind and sky which is the best way of keeping warm. Something about shivering indoors in cold, damp houses and not moving makes you just want to reach for that switch.

We owned up to other difficulties: non-green teenage sons, a clothes habit, too many hot baths in the wintertime. Each circle has its own style. Circle West is developing into a local support group, where ours seemed to contain seeds of political and philosophical discusssion within it. Tully brought up the question of social equity in relation to our pursuit of resources. Naomi brought up the clash between a new culture of limit and the concept of endless universal energy which lies within current spiritual thinking. Can they work together? Or do we need to review the way we think about energy and how it powers our illusionary way of life? In many ways it felt like the real discussion about fossil fuel had only just begun.

If you would like to join a Transition Circle check out the TN2 page on the TN website and find out when the next meetings are and their main subject for discussion.

One Planet Community Kitchen 1 - Deconstructing the Dish

Last night we had our first One Planet Community Kitchen meeting at the Greenhouse in Bethel Street. We met to discuss a new Transition Norwich project, the Low Carbon Cookbook. Twelve people came and we put our heads, hearts and hands together. Josiah shared his broad experience and knowledge of co-ops and laid out their basic structure and tenets. We introduced ourselves and the dish we brought with us to share.

The Kitchen is a regional hub that aims to start up food and arts projects in different Transition initiatives. All the projects will share three aims: 1) to work creatively as a co-operative group 2) to bring ecological awareness to the food we eat 3) to map local food patterns.

In the next few months we’ll be writing on the blog about some of the aims of the Kitchen and showcasing our work. Ways of calculating an ecological footprint for food – looking at carbon emissions, as well as other greenhouse gases, in transport, production and processing. We’ll be considering waste, packaging, the use of water. Several people who came were from the four Transition circles and were Carbon Conversation facilitators; Erik ran the original One Planet group at UEA.

We’ll be focusing on the Transition Food Patterns of Norwich and its hinterlands in the way we began in our Transition Food Patterns Fortnight. Building up a list of producers, talking to people, visiting city allotments and food projects. We’ll be writing information boxes that show why engaging in local market-diversity (as opposed to supermarket monopoly) creates resilient community, what exactly organic certification means. And we’ll be cooking! Trying out recipes that are sustainable, intelligent, delicious, meaningful. Bring a dish to share dishes that everyone can eat.

Last night we talked about many things - how to go forward as a co-op, consensus decision making, bread and bees. Tom talked about how low-carbon food needs to be vibrant and aesthetic, Mediterranean in its temperament. Christine brought the constriction of diets into play. Grower-cooks, Jo and Janet discussed what to do with damson and courgette gluts, Kerry with green tomatoes. Gemma talked miso soup with Donegal seaweed from the Ripple Food Coop she founded in Ipswich. Josiah talked venison sausages supplied by someone he once knew who was licensed to shoot deer in Thetford Forest. Mark talked about a local “omlit”with veg box onions and Cara potatoes we had just dug from the garden. Elena talked honey from the Fat Cat pub and showed us (and gave us to taste) a divine way with runner beans, delicately shredded and flavoured with home-grown chili and brown mustard seeds (didn’t mustard once grow commercially in Norfolk?). Erik showed us a circle that began and ended in compost, a cycle that included seed swaps and germination, weather and parties and snails. The earth is not linear. It goes round and makes extraordinary connections with all its constituent parts. How do we create a book that is non-linear?

The Deconstruct the Dish exercise kickstarts this creative process by putting attention on the material, engaging the imagination, our ability to cross-reference and make different pathways, asking ourselves questions. This is how it goes: everyone sits down at a table with a large sheet of paper (two people to one piece). You draw a circle and put all the ingredients of the dish inside. Then you take each ingredient and write everything you know about it alongside. You ask yourself and/or your drawing partner: Where did I buy this? Which land did it come from? How did it get here? What people were involved? What’s my relationship with them? When did I first eat this dish? Then you share what you discovered with everyone in the room.

I brought fava, a yellow split-pea dish I had once eaten when I was 20 years old. I had arrived on the Greek island before Easter and there was no food to be had in the taverna. Out of nowhere there appeared this dish cooked by the island’s poorest family. They brought it to us shyly, a steaming golden pile, adorned with eggs and olives and a loaf of bread that was baked in the side of the mountain. We devoured it happily. It brings good memories this dish and reminds me of the key to all good meals and creative works - generosity and essential ingredients.

The island was one of the most sustainable places I have ever been. There were no cars, few houses had electricity and everyone drew water from wells and a communal spring. The diet was rough and plain, mostly vegetarian with occasional meat and fish - Easter kid, snails, sea urchins, octopus and bream. The olive oil and thyme honey were the best I have ever tasted. In my picture I drew eggs from Sarah’s roadside stall, parsley grown from Erik’s seeds at the Seed Swap, olives from a Palestinian women’s coop bought at Norwich’s Peace Camp. It was food with meaning, with roots that sank deep in the earth. The industrial food system has no such connection, neither with place nor people, nor our heart’s memory. So to eat sustainably we have to remake those links. That’s one of the main purposes of the Kitchen. Last night some smart and sassy cooks and some essential ingredients came together. Our first project, TN’s Low Carbon Cookbook finally got on the stove . . .

Miso soup by Gemma (Transition Ipswich, Sustain, Ripple Food Coop ) and Green Beans by Elena (TN, CSA, Strangers' Circle). Josiah and Charlotte planning One Planet Community Kitchen at the Greenhouse.; banner - me describing fava; Mark's Cara potatoes; Venison and Puy Lentil Stew by Josiah (Sustainable Bungay, Provenance, East Anglia Food Link). Gemma and Jo listening to Tom from the Greenhouse; Apple and Green Tomato Pie by Kerry (Transition Norwich, Otesha, Greenhouse, Green Grocers)

Many thanks to Tom at The Greenhouse for making us so welcome.

Retro blog #5: I never promised you a rose garden

As well as our topic and themes weeks on This Low Carbon Life we also wrote in three-day (originally five-day) shifts. It gave us a chance to focus on our "home" subjects and to see the breadth of each others' experiences and to respond (the great advantages of contributing to a community blog, as opposed to a solo one, is  knowing you are not on your own). These days allowed us to stretch our wings as writers and photographers and appreciate our different styles and takes on life.

Where we met was in our celebration of plants, people and places. So whether this was Jon talking about bees, planting an oak or finding a city fox, John reporting on his vegetable garden in Little Melton, or rescuing toads on Norfolk roads, Elena on the wild life at Norwich FarmShare or Helen celebrating the artist quarter of Magdalen Street, place making forms the heart of this blog. You could say it created a connection between us, as well as grounding us within our Transition stories. Climate change and "community" can be abstract things unless fully engaged with. A feeling, kinetic and imaginative connection to our neighbourhood and its inhabitants (not just human) help us all make ourselves at home in a rocky and restless time.

One of our most eloquent PPP reporters has been Mark, who manages to weave a love of the wild and medicine plants with an unswerving generosity towards fellow Transitoners. Funny, warm, self-depracating, as well as a great record of community events and meetings, his blogs regularly track the comings and goings of plants, particularly this year where he has curated a Transition medicine bed at Bungay Library Community Garden. I really enjoyed the winter (look still no heating!) Meanwhile let's talk about the weather, the springtime foraging epic Conquering Alexanders and the mix of midsummer meetings in  Life is roses... sometimes.

We are told that life should be a paradise, when we see all about us a wrecked and polluted kingdom. We depend utterly on the plants for our food and air and shelter, yet we are taught to treat them as mere commodities. Somehow we have to restore our relationship with the planet, with each other and get back on track.

Sometimes we find help in the most surprising places . . . .

Magdalen Celebration crew, 2011 from Shift Together - Working Title (helenofnorwich); Mark under neighbourhood cherry from Wallking with Weeds (Charlotte Du Cann)

Some Notes on Tracks and Edges by Mark Watson

31 March 2012

At the edge where we encounter another human being, we discover for ourselves what it is to have to break down a little... Cat Lupton

I am standing on the platform at Lowestoft Station. It is early evening. April 2010. And May. And June. In under an hour I will have traversed the Broads on the two-coach train, past the swans and waterways, past the big sugar factory, past the wide green and gold vistas and the boatyards. And will have arrived in Norwich where I am on my way to a carbon conversations course.

I have loved these journeys, made possible as they have been by a bus service connecting Lowestoft to where I live further down the coast. This will not last. The bus route which has run for 26 years will be reduced then scrapped altogether in the Autumn. No more connecting night buses. The carbon conversations will finish.

I am unsure about the carbon conversations, a 6-session course over twelve weeks aimed at helping people reduce personal and household carbon use and emissions using a non-confrontational approach. I often feel like I’m at school disrupting more well-behaved pupils in a quiet and serious class, and prefer the more creative, deeper, experimental nature of our Stranger’s Circle meetings where we bring our household energy bills to show each other, take a good look at the industrial food system, have difficult conversations about transport use. Where we're making it up as we go along. Where there's more of an edge.

Down the line (sic) I see the value in both approaches, and it was through both the Strangers’ Circle year and carbon conversations that the Low Carbon Cookbook group was born, which meets monthly to explore low carbon ways of buying, growing and preparing food (and write a book about it – always the hardest part!)

But back to the easternmost station in England. I have no such ambivalence about the journeys themselves (carbon-footprint-calculated though they were). Having downshifted in a major way over the past decade from someone who travelled all over the place in bus, car, train and plane, I rarely travel beyond East Anglia now. And I’ve learned to become less spoilt, less desirous of more ‘glamourous’ destinations, more present to where I am.

That platform for instance. If you walked past where the small train stops, where no one goes, in June and July of 2010, you would find, there at the edge, the most extraordinary outbursting of native wildflowers and medicine plants, all Growing Up Through the Cracks: midsummer Mugwort, St. John’s Wort, Plantain and Yarrow, Buddleia and Wild Carrot. All shining in the early evening light. The plant the Chinese use for moxa in acupuncture, the ‘sunshine herb’ dispeller of demons and nightmares, the menders of myriad wounds, the butterfly bush and the ancestor of one of our favourite vegetables.

It is so easy to hate: those who flail the countryside hedgerows and pour poison on the poppies by the junction of the main road. The stupidity of councils and people obsessed by tidiness. The compulsion to keep anything that smacks of ‘wild’ or ‘untamed’ out or under strict control.

Those rude, healthy, resilient plants. How dare they push through those cracks in the polite concrete and tarmac. In the end they were not left alone, beautiful and shining on that part of the platform where hardly anyone went, but removed in the manner of all ‘weeds’ in the name of civic orderliness. They still make their appearance further over on the tracks and by the fences though it’s not quite the same.

And anyone who loves the 'wastegrounds' and the natural world will know how difficult it is to live with the feelings that these things bring up. In my pre-Transition years I was frequently overwhelmed by them. Now after all the meetings and events, carbon conversations and circles, food and plant swaps, wild plant and foraging walks and experiments in downshifting, I still feel the same about the destruction of wildflowers and their habitats, but I'm tougher. I'm taking people out to show them where the 'weeds' grow, what their properties are, how they feed bees, how they heal us and how beautiful they are in their own right, and curating a plant medicine bed with related events.

Not that Transition has been either an easy ride or a magic pill. Learning to temper one's individualism to relate to others, even include them at all and not lose yourself, can be a struggle. There's the frequent temptation to cut off when that carbon conversation is just too, too... annoying. Boring. Left brain. Whatever. Or to simply go along with things that don't feel right because challenging them would make you feel like you WERE THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD WHO FELT LIKE THAT and EVERYONE would look at you like the OUTSIDER YOU REALLY ARE and you would be EXILED.

But engaging in that struggle, difficult, edgy though it is, can bring a meaning and sense to life which no amount of comfort or opulence will ever bring.

And the quote at the top of this piece? It's from an extraordinary post, Meeting Your Edge, by Cat Lupton, writing this week on The Place Between Stories about grappling with individuality and community after an introduction to permaculture course.

It was reading Cat's post that gave me pause to consider these things.

Pics: Mugwort Lowestoft railway station 2010; on the train to Norwich, Lowestoft, 2010; Midsummer wildflowers, Lowestoft, 2010; Plants for Life talk at Bungay Library community garden, 2012

Some Notes on Tracks and Edges

At the edge where we encounter another human being, we discover for ourselves what it is to have to break down a little... Cat Lupton

I am standing on the platform at Lowestoft Station. It is early evening. April 2010. And May. And June. In under an hour I will have traversed the Broads on the two-coach train, past the swans and waterways, past the big sugar factory, past the wide green and gold vistas and the boatyards. And will have arrived in Norwich where I am on my way to a carbon conversations course.

I have loved these journeys, made possible as they have been by a bus service connecting Lowestoft to where I live further down the coast. This will not last. The bus route which has run for 26 years will be reduced then scrapped altogether in the Autumn. No more connecting night buses. The carbon conversations will finish.

I am unsure about the carbon conversations, a 6-session course over twelve weeks aimed at helping people reduce personal and household carbon use and emissions using a non-confrontational approach. I often feel like I’m at school disrupting more well-behaved pupils in a quiet and serious class, and prefer the more creative, deeper, experimental nature of our Stranger’s Circle meetings where we bring our household energy bills to show each other, take a good look at the industrial food system, have difficult conversations about transport use. Where we're making it up as we go along. Where there's more of an edge.

Down the line (sic) I see the value in both approaches, and it was through both the Strangers’ Circle year and carbon conversations that the Low Carbon Cookbook group was born, which meets monthly to explore low carbon ways of buying, growing and preparing food (and write a book about it – always the hardest part!)

But back to the easternmost station in England. I have no such ambivalence about the journeys themselves (carbon-footprint-calculated though they were). Having downshifted in a major way over the past decade from someone who travelled all over the place in bus, car, train and plane, I rarely travel beyond East Anglia now. And I’ve learned to become less spoilt, less desirous of more ‘glamourous’ destinations, more present to where I am.

That platform for instance. If you walked past where the small train stops, where no one goes, in June and July of 2010, you would find, there at the edge, the most extraordinary outbursting of native wildflowers and medicine plants, all Growing Up Through the Cracks: midsummer Mugwort, St. John’s Wort, Plantain and Yarrow, Buddleia and Wild Carrot. All shining in the early evening light. The plant the Chinese use for moxa in acupuncture, the ‘sunshine herb’ dispeller of demons and nightmares, the menders of myriad wounds, the butterfly bush and the ancestor of one of our favourite vegetables.

It is so easy to hate: those who flail the countryside hedgerows and pour poison on the poppies by the junction of the main road. The stupidity of councils and people obsessed by tidiness. The compulsion to keep anything that smacks of ‘wild’ or ‘untamed’ out or under strict control.

Those rude, healthy, resilient plants. How dare they push through those cracks in the polite concrete and tarmac. In the end they were not left alone, beautiful and shining on that part of the platform where hardly anyone went, but removed in the manner of all ‘weeds’ in the name of civic orderliness. They still make their appearance further over on the tracks and by the fences though it’s not quite the same.

And anyone who loves the 'wastegrounds' and the natural world will know how difficult it is to live with the feelings that these things bring up. In my pre-Transition years I was frequently overwhelmed by them. Now after all the meetings and events, carbon conversations and circles, food and plant swaps, wild plant and foraging walks and experiments in downshifting, I still feel the same about the destruction of wildflowers and their habitats, but I'm tougher. I'm taking people out to show them where the 'weeds' grow, what their properties are, how they feed bees, how they heal us and how beautiful they are in their own right, and curating a plant medicine bed with related events.

Not that Transition has been either an easy ride or a magic pill. Learning to temper one's individualism to relate to others, even include them at all and not lose yourself, can be a struggle. There's the frequent temptation to cut off when that carbon conversation is just too, too... annoying. Boring. Left brain. Whatever. Or to simply go along with things that don't feel right because challenging them would make you feel like you WERE THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD WHO FELT LIKE THAT and EVERYONE would look at you like the OUTSIDER YOU REALLY ARE and you would be EXILED.

But engaging in that struggle, difficult, edgy though it is, can bring a meaning and sense to life which no amount of comfort or opulence will ever bring.

And the quote at the top of this piece? It's from an extraordinary post, Meeting Your Edge, by Cat Lupton, writing this week on The Place Between Stories about grappling with individuality and community after an introduction to permaculture course.

It was reading Cat's post that gave me pause to consider these things.

Pics: Mugwort Lowestoft railway station 2010; on the train to Norwich, Lowestoft, 2010; Midsummer wildflowers, Lowestoft, 2010; Plants for Life talk at Bungay Library community garden, 2012

The Day The Merry Go Round Stopped

One day you wake up and everything is changed. You know, for example, that you just can’t go to night-clubs anymore. You still love dancing, but the desire to go out is no longer there. Or the person lying beside you suddenly feels like a stranger. These are shifts everyone knows about, even though each of us experience it for the first time. They are shifts of time, of growing older, of dancing with different people until you find the one you wish to share your life with. There are other shifts to do with individuation - shedding your complexes and your cultural conditioning. These are less well known because not everyone explores the depths of themselves or the breadth of the world. But many seekers through time, and poets have documented them.

But there are some shifts nobody knows about. Because they are the shifts of our human evolution on earth. And some of us are waking up at the moment and feeling everything has changed, except we don’t know quite how to express it.

What’s strange about your life? asked Naomi one night at our Strangers’ Circle. Tully said that everything in his house had suddenly broken down and this had forced him to think about how dependent we are on stuff working and being repaired and what would happen when those services were not available anymore. I didn’t get my chance that night but later at the Low Carbon Roadshow rehearsal we picked different futures out of a hat and improvised who we were and what had happened between 2010 and 2110. Mine was Unknown Quantity. When I took the stage I found myself saying: one day people just stopped and started to do something completely different.

What I had wanted to say at the Circle was that I had noticed that a certain drive had stopped inside. And as a consequence life was feeling strange. Once there had been a great noise and now there was a kind of silence.

For thousands of years the merry go round of civilisation has whirled ceaselessly - the wheel of fortune, the wheel of karma, the wheels of commerce and capitalism. It whirls generations round in a frenzy of speed, music and colour. It seems like everything happens at that funfair: everything fashionable, interesting, important. Relinquish the wheel, advises the Buddha. Don’t linger in fairyland, warn the Ancestors. It’s all an illusion. But no one takes any notice. The pace of our lives is tempered by that glittering speed. We are compelled to go faster, bigger, buy more houses, more clothes, more holidays, more movies, more machines, more cake. If we step off the ledge for one moment we can’t wait for our next turn on that great production line.

The world is made of that speed and that drive. It is the drive of the will. The will to succeed, to overcome, to conquer. Even Transition has been party to its ambition. Partnered with the unkind reason of the mind, it is the force that has run rampage over the globe. It runs through all our lives like Alexander. We drink to keep up with it, always late, on a perpetual deadline. 24/7. We cut corners, skip facts, betray our friends, forget the green world outside the window. We are restless, never satisfied, never sure what we want, looking over our shoulder for the powerful people, to be invited to the right party, to wear the perfect suit, to walk with the gods. We fight time and nature with that drive – even Transition - with our passionate intensity, our desire to escape into all the fun and fantasy of the fair.

We are holding that drive, that inhuman artificial energy in our bodies and sometimes those bodies, those minds, break down.

And sometimes we real human beings break through. That’s a 5 Skin thing. A moment when we align ourselves with everything else on earth and powerdown. The drive stops suddenly, the way going to night-clubs once stopped. You wake up and you can’t do it anymore. It’s not that you decided to. It just happened. Sometimes this happens to individuals and sometimes it happens to a people: it happens because something else has begun to go on in the neighbourhood, something our unkind minds and ruthless wills had not considered. A harmonious way of doing things, of engaging in the world, that affects our inner and outer lives in ways we never imagined. Small bands of people coming together, swapping seedlings, sharing things, writing about everyday events, feeling at home. Focusing on the small things: on bees and walnut trees, a fiery soup and the kindness that can exist between people. Remembering what really matters about being alive on the planet.

The politics of the heart, the new government of the world.


Yesterday in Transition: Walking through the bluebell wood; Mark and Josiah (and Iris and Rueben) working on the kitchen table after lunch.

Shift Together - Working Title

I wrote the original version of this post as part of last month's Arts and Creativity week on the Transition Social Reporting project (beginning again tomorrow 3rd January), and have amended it slightly here for This Low Carbon Life. It looks at some of the huge creative output that has helped shape Transition Norwich (and Sustainable Bungay). May we continue to flourish in 2012!

October 1 2008 Transition Norwich Unleashing I have no idea that sitting at the 'Well-Being, Culture and Arts' table in a packed room at St. Andrews church, with fellow writers, dancers, photographers and nurses, none of whom I know yet except Charlotte, will lead three years and ten thousand blogs, photographs, banners, meetings, parties and news bulletins down a long and winding transition road to writing this Social Reporting post on a windy wet pre-crepuscular December morning sitting up in bed. Yes that was just one sentence but this is the creativity week!

I spend a lot of my life taking photographs of and writing blogs about the Transition initiatives I’m involved in, but until I came to write this post I hadn’t considered it as creativity or art or thought about the enterprise that goes into them. I’d just been getting on with it, mostly in enjoyment, sometimes getting narked about having no funding or how admin and marketing seem always to be seen as more important than creativity and editorial.

But creativity underpins everything.

This Low Carbon Life - Transition Norwich Blog came into being a year after the Unleashing. Charlotte, Jon and Andy met and worked out the format and design between them, and it was launched at our first birthday party. It was to be (and still is) editorially-based, a daily reflection with photographs by transitioners in the Norwich groups and guests, of the experience of being in transition and the move towards living a low carbon life. For my contributions I picked up the Canon Powershot A40 digital camera I’d found at Sustainable Bungay’s first Give and Take Day, and the Olympus Camedia and old Nokia phone cameras Andy had given me, and started shooting and writing.Now over two years later This Low Carbon Life is a living storehouse of the creative output of Norwich transitioners. All of the writing and most of the photography is original.*

So here are some of those pictures and how they represent our lives in Transition Norwich. There is so much, that not everyone or everything will feature. So please do use the comments box below for links to any other This Low Carbon Life people, posts and pictures and your own recollections.

Reconnection with Nature is the most popular label for the posts on This Low Carbon Life. I took the above picture of snowdrops on an early Spring visit to a local wood. One of the things about creativity is its link with the wild, what lies beyond the tamed, cultivated or managed. Which is not to say wild good, cultivated bad. Just that there needs to be awareness and balance.


This is a homegrown chilli, organic pasta, grains and pulses circle arranged and photographed by Charlotte Du Cann for Transition Norwich Strangers' Circle's discussion about (our households') food consumption.

Plastic Bag Dress, Helen and Kerry (by helenofnorwich)

Helen is an artist, TN blogger and wicked photographer. She originated and co-organises the annual Magdalen Street Celebration, which grew out of a Transition Norwich group called NR3 after the postcode. We were sitting at the same table at the Unleashing and were together in the first Heart and Soul, Arts, Culture and Well-being group, known in those early days for its feisty and dynamic meetings and workshops on everything from reskilling to reconnection with nature to clowning, authentic movement and organising Transition Norwich parties. Kerry, also in that early group, was a full-on mover and shaker, blogger, reskiller, event organiser and unremitting downshifter in Transition Norwich until her move to Glasgow in March. We miss her. But she's still blogging, thank goodness... both for This Low Carbon Life and as a Social Reporter on the Transition Network project.

Every month for the Transition Norwich News bulletin I make a banner out of the previous months blog and website pictures. Andy did the first ones and I just fell in love with them. This is the one for December 2010 including the Zero Carbon concert organised by Chris Keene in support of the Cancun climate negotiations.

Celeste the Transition Norwich dragon was created by Bel Greenwood in her front room and made a dazzling appearance at the 2009 Lord Mayor's show. Bringing transition into the city with a fiery blue flash, she was elegantly chauffeured by TN blogger, cyclist, downshifter and original steering group member Chris Hull.

And here is megablogger and co-creator of the Social Reporting project, Charlotte, Dancing at Lughnasa, next to a 'temporary shoreline sculpture' (I just came up with that one, hope it doesn't sound too rarefied!!! I promise not to mention found objects) I made last September called 'Work -> ?' Indeed.

There is music too. Taiko drumming as part of TN's Low Carbon Roadshow at Earth Hour in March 2010 outside the Forum and to open both Magdalen Street Celebrations. And even a rainbow recording.

Tom Harper, who made the film for this year's third birthday celebrations (see on line on our news blog), wrote a gentle song called "In Transition", which he sings at TN's gatherings and parties. I also sang a set with Andy at our First Birthday Party as Fret 6, along with The John Preston Tribute Band (Transition Downham Market and Villages).

In fact, here are the lyrics to Shift Together – Transition Rap (Mostly Sustainable Bungay Version)** which I wrote on a bus from Lowestoft to Norwich and sang at our Big Meeting in August 2010. To the tune of ‘Come Together’ by The Beatles.

We run on chip fat, we down
Shifting quickly, she got
low carbon gumboot, we got
Handmade beehive
We say grow your own and
Plant for beesOur soap’s biproduct glycerine
And we wash when we please

He pushing pedals, he got
Roadshow genny,we got
Solstice sunrise, he make
Medicine jelly, she say
Blog and blog and blog in threes
Got to be Transition
Coming up from our knees

Shift together, right now
It’s in the we

She on the network, we got
No-spam filter, we got
Neighbourhood plug-in, we do
Group newsletter, we say
Meet, greet, eat and
Set the scene
Got to be where we are and
Know where we’ve been

Shift together, right now
It’s more than green

We stitch up old sock, we do
Library courtyard, we swap
Local home-grown, we start
Old Spot pig club
We say you and you and you and me
Let’s forage in the the hedgerows and
Eat roots, shoots and seeds

We own production, we got
Sweet jar banknotes, we got
Solar panel, we know
Birch sap tapper, we say
Give and take and take the lead
Join the dots together and
Share what you don’t need

Shift together, right now (oh yeah)
Sow the seeds

And a few words about Sustainable Bungay:

Setting up the Library Courtyard Community Garden between 2009-10, now in its third year and flourishing, was an enormous labour of the love and creativity of many people, from the planning to the plant bed building to the fundraising. The garden opened to the public on 19th September 2010 (see video below). Here a group of us at the end of July are shovelling earth into the new beds, and having a bit of a song and dance!

At this point I could not resist the temptation to do a pogo dance and sing X-Ray Spex's punk classic Oh Bondage Up Yours! (well, just one verse) whilst tamping down the soil. It didn't take long to realise I was no longer a teenager and the year was actually 2010 not 1978!

Pics: First Birthday party poster (Andy Croft); Snowdrops (Mark Watson); Food Circle (Charlotte Du Cann); Plastic Bag dress, Helen and Kerry (Helen Simpson); Magdalen Street Celebration crew 2011 (Helen Simpson); December Newsbanner 2010 (MW); Celeste the Dragon; Dancing at Lughnasa and Work > ?(MW); Bungay Beehive Day banner(Banner by Bungay Community Bee group, photo MW); Shifting Earth Together (MW) and Oh Bondage Up Yours! (CDC)

*All original photos by the Transition Norwich bloggers are Creative Commons with Attribution. We're happy for people to use them as long as the author is credited.

** Shift Together – Transition Rap Mostly Sustainable Bungay Version) Lyrics by Mark Watson (sung to tune of Come Together by the Beatles) (lyrics Creative Commons with Attribution see * above)

when the left hand knows what the right hand is doing

Welcome to the third in our series based on The Transition Companion where the crew look at different Ingredients and Tools. This week we are considering Chapter 3: Connecting, which contains some of the themes we have focused on this year, including Working with the Council. Forming Local Networks has also inspired a regional series, which this autumn will see reports from working initiatives in London and Scotland. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, I was planning to write about communication today, which forms the main strand of this chapter (hard to connect without communication!). But reading the entries for Oral Histories and The Role of Storytelling, I realise these are very precise exercises which I know little about. Both the initiatives I have been in have been more on the ground than teaching or workshop-based. I do know about writing stories that are embedded in the future, which was the basis for a real newspaper, the Transition Free Press. And I know about speaking with older people about the neighbourhood and getting a deeper sense in time, a sense of a culture and economy based on life without fossil fuels - though only in a non-structured context.

I could write about how hard it is to break the spell of the media, and how listening to people is key to breaking out of our chronic individualism, but to be fair to the book these ingredients are not ones that we have used in our Transition kitchens in Norwich and Bungay. The tool I know however like the back of my hand is Street-by-street behaviour change, which we called Transition Circles. I would say that this was perhaps the most influential and essential enterprise I have taken part in (apart from Working in Groups). Here's our precis in the Companion:

TRANSITION IN ACTION: TRANSITION NORWICH CIRCLES
There are other approaches similar to Transition Streets that have also proved to be very effective. Transition Norwich started a less formal approach called ‘Transition Circles’. In this model, small groups of people meet, usually over a meal, and start with looking at individual actions, creating a space in which people can talk in a real way about lifestyle changes, and are able to support and encourage each other to take the first steps.
The Circles came out of a second wave in the initiative, called Transition Norwich 2.0 (TN2) in 2009, in which a core group of Transitioners made a decision to cut their carbon emissions by half the national average in the key areas of home energy, transport, food and ‘stuff’. The second motivation for TN2 was to start up intentional communities in different neighbourhoods, to bring people together to create and celebrate a low-carbon culture.
The groups have been meeting regularly, and have since broadened their focus to look at larger practical initiatives, e.g. wholefood-buying co-ops. For Transition Norwich, personal carbon reduction is a defining element of what Transition looks like in an urban context. 

To bring personal carbon reduction changed the dance completely because it challenged us to be real about the changes required to downshift. It changed the conversations between us. Transition groups sometimes meet with the understanding that somewhere in the woolly future "the community" will engage in energy descent. However when you put your own highly consumptive lives under the microscope, the kind of double think and denial that allows Transitioners to talk passionately, for example, about peak oil but still take planes, could no longer happen.

In Norwich we ran a series of Carbon Conversations alongside the Transition Circles during 2009-11 and personal downshift became something most of the movers and shakers were engaged in. It formed the basis for our discussion, our measure and a way of life that we celebrated in all its rich detail. It inspired our Low-Carbon Life blog (now in its third year), and the Low Carbon Cookbook. We didn't see it as behaviour change, we saw it as culture change, something we were creating together. It was another story about the world we could tell. And we told everyone we met. Look here we are in old coats, on the bus, eating beetroot, chopping firewood!

I was in the Strangers' Circle for about six months and in that time radically reduced the energy I used, the waste I produced, relocalised my larder, joined a wholefood coop, learned to share a car, stopped buying stuff apart from essentials. Two years later those decisions carry on being made: reduce, reuse, recycle, repair. We have not put the heating back on. We eat almost entirely seasonally. This year I haven't bought any clothes. I'm not thinking about "carbon reduction" anymore, or even writing about it: it's become embedded in the everyday fabric of my life and continues to affect everything I do and every conversation I have.

The high aims that we had for the Circles to spread around the city did not happen, but as speakers for Transition we became real about what we were saying. That has its own homeopathic effect within the living breathing world. We live in a mind-based culture which is happy with the abstract, with words rather than actions. We can dismiss billions of strangers by talking blithely about "too many people on the planet" and yet be unable to face the real-life death of a close friend. We are happy with the theories of Transition but do not necessarily engage in what it takes.

One of the functions of communication is to allow people to speak from their true beings and from their experience and to find a common ground, and for that we have to listen. We spent those winter months 2009-10 when the four pioneer Circles were up and running, talking in a small group about our everyday struggles to live a more frugal and respectful life-style, one that was kinder to the planet and to the people we would never meet who made it possible. It was hard going because we had to face our own denial in each other's front rooms, or around the kitchen table. We had to listen to difficult things and not shut down. Allow our resistances and resentments to be there in the alchemical space of the room. We had to know that this was everyone's shared experience, one way or another. We didn't talk in the abstract: we looked at electricity bills, car logs and shopping lists. We confessed to supermarket habits, having hot baths, driving too much. And then we acted on our findings and feeling during the following months.


Maybe one of the stories we need to tell each other is that everything in Transition goes through a process. Stories allow you to look back and treasure everything with what Roberto Calasso calls the "douceur of time". Just because a project isn't still current, or established, or a social enterprise, or famous in some way, doesn't mean it was a failure. The Circles were a huge success in that they broke a pattern, taught us clarity and generosity and endurance, and opened a rich seam of stories that enabled, for example, the Social Reporting Project to come into being and gave Norwich FarmShare its cultural backing. For Transition to work there have to be stories - real stories, real experiences - heart-warming testimonies about the struggles and rewards of doing downshift, not scientific graphs and behaviour mananagment. For that as we need real storytellers, people who are prepared to stand by the words they speak and write, and tell it how it is right now - not how it should be or was once long ago.

We had a lot of fun too especially sharing the meals (we were all cooks) and there was this sense that we were not engaged in a programme or teaching, but pioneering something that people hadn't done before. No one was in charge. We were all of us in the dark. No one knew anymore than anyone else and that made our moves exciting and real. It connected us in a way that still, years later, makes sense of what we do, even though most of us no longer see each other and the initiative is no longer up and running as it once was. The Circles were a way-though. I don't think I would be where I am now without having take part in them. So this is a recognition of that and a thank you too, to all the people I sailed with on that powerdown journey.

Because those storytellers are not the oral historians in our community, or the journalists in the conventional media. They are us.

Images: all banners from reports on Transition Circles and Carbon Conversations 200-2011 in Transition Norwich News; Hold the Front Page, Transition Culture; colleciting apple grafts and fingerless gloves and the Stranger's Circles discussion on Resilience in This Low Carbon Life.